Permanence of some ecological systems with several predator and one prey species

The stability criterion used in the following is permanence. Permanence means that all trajectories starting in the interior are ultimately bounded away from the boundary and that this bound is independent of the initial values. Hence sufficiently small fluctuations cannot lead to extinction of any species. In the following we deal with one-prey, two-predator resp. one-prey, three-predator systems and a one-prey, two-predator, one-top-predator system with three trophic levels. It turns out that the characterization of permanence for such models described by Lotka-Volterra dynamics is rather simple and elegant.